Anabel Juarez Creates and Redefines her World in Clay

In the inaugural exhibition of the artist-run-space, Ruberta, Juarez presents two large-scale dress forms made entirely of fired clay in the two-person show, Hacer una Isla. These works create a paradigm shift that challenges normative understandings of the female figure, the accepted scale of ceramic objects, and the scale and delicacy we often associate with art engaging the experience of being a woman. The loosely rendered forms show each mark of the process of their making connecting their ontology directly to the artist and indexing to the natural human touch and the immediate record of physical contact clay allows. These large dresses stand alone as uninhabited spaces, inviting the viewer to consider the body these garments may have once covered while also existing as metonymical place holders for the role of women in society at large. The dresses invite us to consider the way traditional mainstream society sees women; as a generalized female shape with accentuated female bodily indicators in a dress. This distillation of contemporary female identity under the reductive male gaze offers us an understanding of this lived reality, while demanding attention and precedence through their massive scale.

In a very different display of works at Five Car Garage, Juarez takes us to a surreal, psychological space in Lente/Primavera. In this series of playful, sculptural vignettes, Juarez reveals the magical potential of the earth elements comprising the ceramic medium. In contrast to the works at Ruberta, these miniscule moments draw us into the objects to inspect their material wonder. Each work evokes sensuality, the caesura of time, and the investigation of constructed space in tiny worlds. The works appear at once as confections and landscapes inviting a separate conversation around beauty and desire as translations of our inherent attraction to the aesthetic quality of the natural environment and to the hedonistic pleasure of consuming the sweetness of the world.

The works in these two unique shows are a sculptural, architectural, and psychological experience. They allow us to reenter the world through the eyes and mind of Anabel Juarez, her fixations, and her personal identity politics. This range of works reveals both the potential of the ceramic medium today and Juarez’s profound versatility as an artist, while giving form to the interior world of the human subconscious and the exterior systems of visio-social constructs surrounding the female body today.